Past Faceoffs

Predictions

Tough one to pick as we don’t really know which VP will show up. The main point for me is they are playing behind closed doors for the first day, so although they are in Poland and determined to do well, they won’t have the crowd hyping them, they won’t feel the atmosphere, they will merely feel the pressure of expectation at them getting through to the third day. I worry for them in this game and feel like unless astralis really plays a poor game, we have not seen enough of VP to suggest to us they have what it takes to win this game. They have been bootcamping a lot, and judging by their matches in the pro league, they still need a lot of work. As for right now, I would go LOW on astralis as long as the odds stay around how they are now.

Maps

Dust2: 65-35 Astralis

Inferno: 65-35 Astralis

Mirage: 50-50

Cache: 55-45 Astralis

Train: 50-50

Overpass: 60-40 Astralis

Cobblestone: 60-40 VirtusPro

Thoughts

Always been a 50-50 but with VP rather slumping, I’m not sure how VP are going to win this. Their most recent H2H was two BO1’s for ESL and these were two comfortable wins for Astralis, I expect this to be another comfortable win for Astralis when they simply ban out Cobblestone and Train.

Low (5%) on Astralis

Conclusion

Obviously VP are in a really, really tough spot in their careers right now. They are in a ridiculously big slump, however it does appear that slowly but surely they were coming out of it in their online matches vs some top tier 1/2 teams. They have been bootcamping and not to mention that this event is in their home country, Poland so the home crowd advantage is a factor here, and overall I feel like VP has been really preparing here. We all know VP for this kind of stuff, really bad performances, or really good and then all of a sudden it’s like a flip switches and we see the complete contrast, so you can never count them out or get too confident. I do think that in a BO1 they definitely have a change here, aswell as it being a LAN in Katowice once again. Astralis are not the team that I have the most confidence in, they are really inconsistent themselves and while I do favor them here, just something about Astralis and confidence, doesn’t work for me. Overall, don’t count VP out here, not by any means. Really high risk game, 63-37 in favor of Astralis.

Virtus.pro are in a massive slump right now, they’ve played 15 matches since November and lost 14 of them, the only match they managed to win was a nail biting match against ENVYUS which ended up being a 22-20 win for Virtus.pro, their performance is very disappointing and there is no excuse for that.

Virtus.pro always struggled against Astralis and their record is pretty bad, Astralis won majority of the past encounters and they should be favored here, however Virtus.pro bootcamped for the last two weeks or so and that’s quite scary, a short bootcamp is surely not enough to win the entire event, but there is a chance they beat Astralis or ENVYUS in the group stage, Virtus.pro is still a tier 1 team after all.

Everything will come down to the map veto process, VP’s best maps are mirage, cobblestone and overpass, while Astralis should have a good advantage on the rest, Virtus.pro will most likely veto inferno, dust2 and cache, while Astralis should remove cobblestone, train and one of the remaining maps, we should see either mirage or overpass and Astralis should be slightly favored on both of these.

This match is insanely risky and could go either way, although Astralis are my favorites and I suggest a small bet on the danes.